Tag: Motherhood

Seek, Memory …

If memory is an unreliable narrator, how can it be the medium through which we arrive at the truth about ourselves?

Mother of a Pandemic

If there is a way forward for the “pandemic novel,” it may be in Emma Donoghue’s claustrophobic settings of motherhood and childbirth.

Mother Courage

The summer I turned 17, in the springboard pause between high school and university, I began working as a nurse aide in the geriatric rest home and hospital run by my mother.

Acts of Mothering

Back in 1976, Adrienne Rich described what she called the “institution of motherhood.” When biological motherhood was turned into a social and historical institution, she explained, the potential ...

Surrogacy Stories

Midway through Mike Birbiglia’s latest one-man show, The New One, the ceiling above the stage opens and various baby paraphernalia cascade onto the stage floor. An oversized stuffed bear, a breast ...

Our Mothers, Ourselves

I intended to begin with a personal admission. “I didn’t like being pregnant,” I was going to write, before describing the bodily discomforts (hypersalivation!) and psychic stresses (due date during ...

“Test-Tube Babies” @40

Forty years ago, on July 25, 1978, an English baby of ordinary working-class parentage was delivered by caesarian section. At 11:47 p.m., her mother, obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, Cambridge ...